I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does notsuffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be whatthey could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God forthe lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knewwhat death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice butof necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more thanEisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mindfor it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the tablefor the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies struttingup to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefullyscreened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He doesnot mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn.

He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him tolook solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans whomade the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him,you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which hedoes not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacityfor it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousanddead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. Theycome to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wivesand children who will suffer to the end of their days a terriblytorn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembranceof aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liabilitywhich is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrivalof their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regretsnothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was,as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret thathis bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his"mission-accomplished" a disaster. He does not regret that ratherthan controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So henever mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have foughtthis war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He hadnot the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to thosewho knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go towar when it is one of the options but when it is the only option;you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not tocheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. Thispresident and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only onething - to take power, to remain in power, and to use that powerfor the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do thatas well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country getsbehind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate.

And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he doesnot sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives andchildren. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feelfor the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty fivemillion of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the fortypercent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel forthe miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working peoplehe has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-halfto pay their bills- it is amazing for how many people in this countrythis President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he isrelieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their taxburden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting theair we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasingthe safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs,and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefitsfor overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raisingthem into the professional class. And this litany of lies he willversify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, whenjust what he and his party are doing to our democracy is chokingthe life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. Iremember the millions of people here and around the world who marchedagainst the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous arousedoversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders.Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone hadever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most ofthe time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millionsof people that America was ceding its role as the last best hopeof mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype ofdemocracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democraticrepublic in history was turning its back on the future, using itsextraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of aconcordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribalcombat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct,who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means thanpre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president thenation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleablenational soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds oflawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. Thepeople he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get intoand get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the mediaamplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes theface of our sky, the conditions that prevail.

How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America giventhe stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitivelawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannotmourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn forourselves.

Copyright 2004 East Hampton StarThe original is here.A bibliography of Doctorow's work is here.